MOSCOW, November 21. /TASS/. The international human rights community must pay attention to what is tantamount to "language terror" by the Latvian authorities against ethnic minorities, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a commentary following the Latvian Constitutional Court’s refusal to sustain a lawsuit for the preservation of private schools offering instruction in the Russian language.
"This politically motivated decision strips the Russian-speaking residents of Latvia of the last chance to receive education in the mother tongue, moreover, for one’s own money," the commentary runs. "The Latvian authorities’ policy of ‘language terror’ has been repeatedly and meaningfully criticized by such international organizations of influence as the Council of Europe and the OSCE and the leading experts, such as the CE Human Rights Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic and the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Lamberto Zanier. We are urging the international human rights community to step up pressure on the Latvian authorities at a time when the language situation for the ethnic minorities in that Baltic country is critical."
In accordance with Riga’s so-called education reform instruction at all government-run schools will be exclusively in the Latvian language starting from the 2021/2022 academic year. Now the Constitutional Court has recognized as legal the elimination of private schools for ethnic minorities.
The Russian Foreign Ministry says that "such outrageous discrimination runs counter to Lithuania’s commitments under the basic international legal documents, including the 1950 Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education, the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.